Going into my third reading of Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore (2005), translated by Philip Gabriel, it sits on the second tier, alongside one other novel, Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle stands alone on the first tier as his greatest achievement (a book that survives, for English readers, getting cut down from the original). Three books, all novels, what he does best. On the third tier is his short fiction and some good but lesser novels, in the same vein and not. My doubts began after 1Q84, a novel superficially of a piece with his earlier works but without their vim or vigor or quotidian pleasures. An effective combination for smothering enthusiasm: long and mediocre. Then I read Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage and decided he'd blown out all four tires at once. The only thing to be said in its favor is Chip Kidd's nifty cover art. A new writer trying to publish a book of that quality would get nowhere. At which point the brand has taken over. So I'm reluctant to read anything he's come out with since, instead testing the earlier books (and my earlier judgments) with rereads, hoping the magic will still be there.
One thing that continues to distinguish Murakami from most every other fiction writer I've encountered, even now, is how weird and disorienting he is. Few attempt it and those who do wink at the reader, aren't quite as committed, or simply aren't as good. Something about realism is that, though not realistic, the material for it is readily accessed and the basic reality of the work is unlikely to be questioned. Cormac McCarthy's criticism of magical realism: It's already hard enough to get the reader to believe the fiction without making it impossible. This is one aspect of Murakami's work his early critics scoffed at. In Kafka on the Shore, a kid converses with an imaginary companion, Crow. Another voice, an omen, interjects in bold type. An introduction that leads to the first chapter: A break from the usual pattern of a life to go on a mysterious (planned, fateful) journey. As the air of fantasy thickens, the kid, Kafka Tamura, tells us that it all sounds like a fairytale but it isn't. What is it, then? Murakami is a fan of Catcher in the Rye and one may also anticipate a take on the bildungsroman. Then the novel jumps way back, to post-WWII Japan, a government document seemingly having nothing to do with Tamura's journey.
I may have unconsciously reached for Murakami's work as I found myself thinking about the subject of contrivance again. A shibboleth of fiction is that it's like a sort of waking dream. And yet rarely is fiction truly weird like a dream. Last night I dreamed Michael Douglas had gelled his hair into spikes. Awaking drenched in sweat, I asked: Why? Why? Fiction tends to be too neat and logical to resemble Michael Douglas's cool new haircut, precisely. These qualities become defects in contrived fiction, turning it into something more like the opposite of a dream. Instead of the scary, unfamiliar, alluring feeling of surrending control to the mystery of the mind and whatever springs from it, the writer of contrived fiction exercises overt control through readymade scenes, obvious lines, predictable directions, a scarcely concealed agenda, the futile pursuit of perfect symmetry. To a certain reader, that's reassuring, like waking up safe in bed. To be perceived as weird is shameful, so the crude life lesson goes, a mark of social deviance. That was Murakami's position in the literary world for years and that is Murakami at his very best: a sui generis writer of truly dreamlike fiction, weird and unpredictable (and warm and playful and down-to-earth all at the same time). He lends attractive form to what's repressed, sometimes so thoroughly that it's forgotten, giving the reader the okay to loosen up and tap into a hidden freaky side. And it's not either/or but both: student and translator of Raymond Carver, he's celebrated for his appreciation of the mundane too. More than that, he widely inspires fascination and love.
The reader can't guess where Kafka on the Shore is going, can't venture a list of possible directions with any certainty. At best: Two characters will meet. Somehow. In this sense, the "Kafka" in the title is earned. But there are drawbacks of truly dreamlike fiction that more controlled fiction aims to avoid or soften. Rough edges, loose ends, drift. While traveling to his next destination, Kafka meets and accompanies a woman, Sakura. Later, he needs to lie low and stays the night at her apartment. Thus far they've been friendly. Then, noticing he's tense, she casually offers him a hand job and obliges. Afterward they have the following exchange:
She thinks for a while, then says, "I was thinking how nice it'd be if I was your real sister."
"Me too," I say.
Not only does the...strangeness of that go unexamined and unremarked, it turns out to have no bearing on the novel. It's just there.
And I'd forgotten or hadn't noticed in prior readings Murakami's attempt at satirizing feminists, notable because he rarely goes in for satire and because of the criticism of his female characters generally, how they often aren't full characters in their own right, are little seen, or are felt merely when missing. The feminists who show up at the library are a type recognizable among any group of people who consider themselves politically engaged warriors fighting the good fight: petty, dogmatic, rancorous. Preaching to (or performing for) the converted while alienating anyone who would otherwise be open to what they have to say. A senseless, self-defeating strategy for catalyzing actual positive change that can be met with ridicule but also with patience. However some people choose to communicate, their grievances may be legitimate and their beliefs sincere. In certain situations, it's better to keep a cool head, listen, and work through the problem carefully. The other party, seeing someone cares, may respond by adopting the same attitude. What starts as a seemingly hopeless conflict turns into the ideal exchange. Oshima, the librarian, could have done just that. The feminists are part of the community and patrons of the library. Why don't they get a say? Instead, Oshima treats them like fools with absolutely nothing worthwhile to complain about, cowing them with weak humor and pedantry. He can't stand their intolerance.
(For Murakami's part, he once responded to a complaint, a silly complaint concerning a miniscule detail in his work most writers would have ignored or joked about, by rewriting the offending passage, in a diplomatic spirit, and moving on.)
I could list more, all natural and acceptable byproducts of Murakami's approach, hardly worth mentioning. One major flaw that can't be overlooked, however, is that Kafka Tamura is a bit of a shade, defined not by his personality or voice but by his journey. And it's a journey that, for much of the book, loses rather than gains clarity of intent the more he talks about it, piling on reasons. He's obeying fate, which explains, somewhat, his most discernible characteristics, timidity and guilt (one can argue that he's as much antagonist as protagonist). He's also: searching for mother and sister, escaping home and the potential damage it might cause, accelerating into adulthood, trying to disappear, living freely if clumsily. Finally he says he's "lost." One picks up on the theme of self-discovery, tentatively, in between discussions of literature, music, and history, dim shadows, other halves, spirit projections, murdered cats, cameos by Johnnie Walker and Colonel Sanders. Hundreds of pages in, the book's dreamlike quality intensifies. It's absorbing, rather bewildering, and close to inscrutable.
Though ultimately I'm confident in the meaning I derived from the novel as well as why I don't think it withstands a third read. One can say, like John Updike, that it's simply about Kafka Tamura growing up. But that's insufficient. Other characters, adults, go through their own journies on the margins of the book and arrive at the same sort of course-shifting insight into the self. Deeper, deeper, no matter what age, into the darkness within to confront, for Kafka, the source of his pain. Murakami's challenge, then, is to make the reader feel it, so that it matters when Kafka is released from it, so that the reader shares his experience of a brand new world. An unintended irony of the book is that, though it's about delving deeper, that's exactly what Murakami fails to do for his characters, despite the book's length. During a climactic scene, Kafka proclaims what's haunted him through his life. In a better novel, he wouldn't have to.
A couple of images from his best novel are frequently and fondly invoked by Murakami's readers: Toru and his afternoon spaghetti (and, for me, defending his lunch choice to a stranger). Toru sitting at the bottom of a well. To these vivid, humanizing details I would add his reaction to his wife's suggestion to make a living by writing poetry professionally (Poetry!?). One indication that Kafka on the Shore is a lesser work is that nothing comparable sticks in memory. I am intrigued by a couple of ideas. One is that a person can follow a path in life created by art. After watching Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows, Kafka Tamura, emulating the troubled main character, drinks a bottle of milk in one gulp. (A note from DA of the past jotted beside the passage reminds me that the movie ends on the shore.) The other is Oshima's opinion of Schubert's piano sonatas and the value of boring art: "People soon get tired of things that aren't boring, but not of what is boring. Go figure." Still, it's the effect of Kafka on the Shore that lingers more than anything else, making it the sort of dream that startles but dissolves.
